Lex Frieden

Lex Frieden
Born	1949 Alva, Oklahoma
Residence	Houston, Texas
Alma mater	University of Tulsa University of Houston National University of Ireland, Galway
Occupation	Professor
Website	Lex Frieden Home

Lex Frieden (born 1949) is an American educator, researcher, disability policy expert and disability rights activist. Frieden has been called "a chief architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act." He is also regarded as a founder and leader of the independent living movement by people with disabilities in the U.S.

Lex Frieden was born in Alva, Oklahoma, a rural community in northwestern Oklahoma. He graduated from Alva Senior High School in 1967 and began studying electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. It was as a freshman that he sustained a spinal cord injury in an automobile accident. As part of his rehabilitation from that injury, he went to TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston, where he met Dr. William A. Spencer, the rehabilitation medicine visionary. Dr. Spencer became Lex's mentor.

Frieden's service in the 1970s included membership on a Congressional task force on science, technology and disability empaneled by Olin E. Teague (1910–1981), U.S. Congressman from Texas. The panel's mission was to study what was and was not being done in disability-related research across the entire swath of the U.S. Government. That panel's work led, in 1978, to creation of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), a unit of the US Department of Education.

Frieden was one of the major figures behind the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. As Executive Director of the National Council on Disability (NCD) in the mid-1980s, reporting to presidentially appointed Council members notably including Vice Chairman Justin Dart, Jr., Frieden oversaw the work of Robert Burgdorf in writing the first drafts of what was to become the ADA. The Council issued two major reports, Toward Independence and On the Threshold of Independence, to further the effort along. President George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into law on July 26, 1990. Other significant legislation inspired by the Council while Frieden was director included the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 (ACAA) and legislation to make national parks and recreation areas accessible to people with disabilities.

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